Cyber-arms dealer offers $1M for weaponizable Iphone bugs

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It is a shame that the future we have ended up living in is the distopian cyberpunk one rather than some thing more Utopian. I think we can see the sort of people who are to blame for this unfortunate turn of events.

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BB was a pretty depressing read this AM (Pacific time zone) with this, the dbag hedge fund monger and champetry - to mention but a few distressing stories at the moment.

I’m reminded, for some reason, of the wisdom of Nancy, one of Big Jeff’s waitresses back in May of '84, “look at it this way: in a hundred years who’s gunna care…” but I think in a touch more than that our descendants will look back at this time as the second dark ages. A time that was ruled by, and in fact celebrated, greed and sociopathy.

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The only (minor) cause for optimism is that the offer is that relatively high. If the price were “Eh, maybe 10k if it’s really clever” and only advertised in…select…circles; that’d suggest that there are plenty of options to choose from. A million suggests some amount of scarcity(though, given that the offer is for a fully transparent remote exploit; no more user interaction than visit webpage/view SMS; that is actually pretty short money given how many people with juicy data use iDevices and will thus soon be using iOS 9.

I imagine that the broker’s offer is attractive because it keeps you at arms length from anything you’d get locked up for; but sales of insider celebrity gossip to tabloids would probably be worth more; never mind the more creative options.

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Oh, most certainly.

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I believe the offer is time limited and capped at 3 rewards. So the relatively high offer is probably with the conditions is probably also designed to spur people into racing.

I ended up with their site as a search result yesterday as I was trying to search for stability/bugs/other issues before i decide to upgrade to ios9 myself.

The photo with this article is clickbait. This has nothing to do with iOS jailbreaking. :frowning:

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The image that accompanies this story (which is a story about Ios jailbreaking) is the logo used by the company discussed in this article to advertise its $1M bounty for Ios jailbreak vulns, which is the subject of this article.

If I found such a bug, for this price I’d sell out.
Few wouldn’t.
Being cash-strapped gets old after a while.

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What’s to stop folk from finding out, and then once the check to the Caymans clears, publishing the info anonymously?

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A hefty NDA and a lawsuit if they’re caught.

But yeah, could be done. Probably has been.

What one person can find out, others can, too. A few well-placed tips to that effect can speed the process along rather untraceably, which is even better because the prize recipient doesn’t even need to do the writeup.

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And I came in here all excited about these!

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Or something like this?

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New business plan:

  1. Develop iPhone software including zero hour bug
  2. Profit!
  3. Sell bug to cyber arms dealer
  4. Profit!
  5. “Discover” bug and develop patch
  6. Profit!
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